This is how you know you know shit is just about to get real! My new convention display banner for Dumbing of Age arrived by FedEx today, because convention season is… imminent. Frighteningly imminent. Oh my god oh my god.

Anyway, there’s a new DoA banner because I previously didn’t have one! And I figgered, hey, well, maybe I should probably definitely. I’ll bring this and last year’s Shortpacked! banner, the one that interlocked with the older banners, but from now on it’ll just be that banner and this one. …or until I make a new SP! banner, anyway. I had planned to do a new one along with this new DoA banner, but I couldn’t get a good composition, so I shelved it for a while.

…man, I should put a Convention Appearances box somewhere on this site like I do back over on Shortpacked!, shouldn’t I? Regardless, I make my first appearance of the year faaaaaaaar over on the west cost at Emerald City Comic-Con. That’s from March 4-6. See you there!

So this is the infamous half-blender of Webcomic Rampage. For those readers of mine who still haven’t heard this story, let me retell it here. I shipped two boxes of books to the Austin Dragon’s Lair comic shop ahead of myself so that I could sell them to my fans. One box arrived easy-as-you-please! The other box had been opened, books removed, placed in a new box, with the books exchanged with half a blender. HALF A BLENDER. So, yeah. Post Office lost/stole/ate my books, and gave me an incomplete blender in exchange. That was fun! But a good story, I guess?

But the sad, sobering reality is that losing those books cost me a potential few hundred dollars in sales. That blows! So to share this story and to help recoup my losses, since there’s no real legal recourse for me to retrieve these books or my lost potential sales, I’ve doodled a bunch of my characters on the surface of this blender with a Sharpie. And you can own it. Keep in mind, it is an INCOMPLETE blender. You will only get what you see here. Just the bottom, with a plug. There’s no top half. The blender also has some scuff marks at some of the edges where its silvery finish was removed in transit. But on the plus side, there’s now all these Shortpacked! and Dumbing of Age characters on it. Sweet, huh?

I’ve left a spot up next to Ultra Car where the winner of the blender can request anyone they feel is important that I’ve forgotten. (Which, as it turns out, will probably be Mike. Man, how’d I forget him? Oh well, you can request him should you win. Or somebody else! There’s also no Dorothy, no Reagan, no Sal…) So, uh, yeah! You can own this piece of dubious webcomics history.

Dumbing of Age is full of roommates who are foils, so I wanted at least one pair of roomies to be so similar that its bad for both of them. So meet the two social recluses, Amber and Dina. Here’s some folks who won’t be leaving their room very often. Amber will be faceplanting herself into WoW while Dina will be too busy obsessing about dinosaurs to chip away at her crippling social phobias. Aren’t they a fun, largely invisible pair. They enable each other.

Sal was the third character I redesigned for Dumbing of Age. Joyce and Sarah were pretty easy. They were both college students 13 years ago, so reworking them was just a menial wardrobe update. But Sal, in her other life, was a alien-fighting superhero. Dumbing of Age was a fresh start that had no aliens, which presented a conundrum for Sal. What is Sal like in a world where she doesn’t have the tragic focal point that made her who she is, while still keeping her quintessentially Sal?

In Roomies! and It’s Walky!, Sal probably had the biggest variety of “outfits.” She went through a lot of visual evolutions. So I pulled from some of them, grabbing her jacket and her midriff shirt and her gloves, and, trying to create a “motorcycle girl” motif, I drew a homeless man.

My wife, Maggie, was all, “Dude, what the fuck. That’s awful.” This went on for some time. And she was right, of course. She helped me as we looked through Google Images of actual motorcycle-riding outfits. She told me what had to be done. And I did it. Sal is Maggie’s creation. She’s our little baby that we made together, and just like real babies, the wife did all of the actual work.

So sometimes I spend a whole lotta time drawing backgrounds, only for them to get covered up almost entirely by characters. I mean, I know what parts are gonna get covered up, since I blue-pencil everything down before starting to ink, but I try to draw the complete background anyway, on its own layer. Hey, y’never know when I’ll be able to use it again! (Or use it to make a blog post.) And it’s much easier to reuse backgrounds if you don’t have to fill in people-shaped holes with the edges of trees or windows or whatever.

Regardless, this is what it looks behind our heroes in today’s strip. There’s four people standing in a row in most of the wide shots, so of course you can’t see much of it! But here it is for posterity.

Like clockwork, here’s Mike’s fashion closet. Some readers have commented that it’s kind of weird to think of Mike wearing things that aren’t either his original black t-shirt or the Shortpacked! uniform. I agree! Well, I agreed more about a year ago, before I started giving Mike some other things to wear, here and there. For example, above’s dark gray tee over the black-sleeved shirt is something I introduced in Shortpacked!‘s “This Man, this Manhattan” storyline just out of sheer necessity, since, well, he needed a change of clothes. Since then, it’s been easier. Mike wears browns, blacks, and grays. Not so hard, huh? Just had to break the ice.

I imagine Mike also has a collection of t-shirts that would make people mad, in certain company. He loves to wear his “Twilight” shirt to the local comic book store, for example. Feel free to brainstorm your own.

Here’s Amazi-Girl’s “model sheet.” This is all she wears, so there aren’t any alternate outfits to show you. Well, okay, maybe eventually she’ll get some arctic gear or Tiger Force deco, but we’ll save that for later.